Tips Tuesday – SEO Interview, WP Rocket Tests, Voice Search

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• Join me for a live interview with SEO consultant Brian Weiss this Wednesday
• DIY SEO Workshop on Rising Ranking Factors and live speed test tonight
• How SEO saved the day when a company had their marketing budget slashed
• WP Rocket Tests are complete and what’s next
• Why you need to vet what you read about speed
• Google’s new deadline for when speed will become a mobile ranking factor
• What is UX and why bother with it
• Study finds 80% of Voice Search comes from Answer Box Snippets and how you can get in on it
• When virtual reality will hit WordPress sites
• The importance of goal setting for bloggers

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BlogAid Happenings

Interview with SEO Consultant Brian Weiss this Week

This is one interview you can’t afford to miss.

I’m so excited to be speaking with super top SEO consultant Brian Weiss of Stone Temple Consulting this Wednesday, the 24th at 1pm ET / 10am PT.

I know a lot of you have been revamping your old content. That can take a big SEO toll.

And that’s one of the main things we’ll be chatting about.

Plus, we’ll cover emerging SEO opportunities that you want to get in on, like Voice Search and Answer Box.

Visit the post for the link to the show and the full list of what we’ll be covering.

DIY SEO Workshop on Rising Ranking Factors

We’ve had 2 live bonus sessions for the DIY SEO folks in the past week to go deeper into our Technical SEO fixes. The one we had Monday helped us clean up all of our 404s in Google Search Console. We specifically looked at the reports of broken links on other sites to us.

Folks are finding all manner of old issues and cleaning them up, and that’s really going to help Google find our legit stuff, instead of old things we’ve taken down or replaced.

Tonight, we’ll have our next live Workshop on Rising Ranking Factors and we’ll be brainstorming ways to get into Voice Search and the kind of formatting that works well with Answer Box and KnowledgeGraph.

Getting my posts into the KnowledgeGraph has consistently sent me more traffic for 3, going on 4 years now.

It makes a world of difference to cooperate with Google and get every benefit they offer.

We’ll also be running a live speed test.

Are You Missing Out?

It’s not too late to join us in the DIY SEO course.

We’re just getting ramped up into our 8 workshops that will give you a super solid SEO foundation and help diversify your traffic streams.

For those of you heavily relying on Pinterest for your traffic, this is THE course you need to be taking right now.

You know as well as I do that the Pinterest bubble is already starting to pop and you need to get ahead of that curve.

It takes 6-8 months to establish yourself with Google.

So, the time to start taking action with that is now.

SEO Saved the Day

Last week I was chatting with one of my big time marketing buddies who handles all of the marketing for a large specialty school with 5 campuses.

They ran into an accreditation issue and may be purchased soon.

So, for the next month or so their marketing budget was cut to zero.

Yet, they still have high visits to their site and inquiries for enrollment.

Why? Because they have solid SEO.

Even without ads and billboards and social media, they are still being found and still getting new business.

So, if you’ve got all of your eggs in some social media or ad campaign basket, seriously give some thought to how dangerous that is and why you need search on your side so when the rug gets yanked out from under you, that you don’t fall through the floor too.

WP Rocket Tests Complete

This weekend I finished up my tests for WP Rocket.

I’ve already shared that 70 page case study report with my Level 6 Webmasters.

I made some really interesting discoveries, including one feature that seems like it would be a must-have for all sites, at least for speed, but may have a negative SEO impact. I’m still digging into that. I’ll have a post with all of it for you in the coming months.

But first, I’ve decided to go ahead and do a new head-to-head caching test with all of the top and popular caching plugins, plus server-side caching options at SiteGround.

My last such test was in 2016 and those plugins and host features have changed. And there are new plugins that I want test.

So, while I’ve got this test setup, and my head in it, I’m going to keep at it.

Plus, this will lead me straight into the ultimate speed tests that I had planned for this spring anyway.

I have to keep my webmasters as far ahead of the coming pain curves as possible, so speed research has become my top priority alongside the SEO course.

And you’ll hear why that is so radically important for all site owners in just a moment.

Vet What You Read About Speed

Let me be crystal clear with you about how important this is.

I read all types of posts about how to increase your speed. They never say anything about looking at what is actually slowing down your site first.

You’re just shooting in the dark with this stuff.

I also read plenty of posts with tests that attempt to prove some adjustment improves your speed. They never say anything about their test conditions.

Here’s what counts with speed tests:

• The type of host you’re on can radically impact the effectiveness of any type of speed improvement you put on your site.
• One-off testers like Pingdom, that don’t test the full page load will give you a false sense of speed too.
• Where the tests originate is another huge factor in accuracy.
• And Google PageSpeed Insights is the least accurate, least helpful tester on the planet.
• Scores don’t matter – what goes into making up those scores does.

If the post you’re reading doesn’t mention the items above, forget about it.

Get a site audit and see what’s really slowing down your site.

Get the numbers, get the list of improvements, then check the numbers again to ensure the fixes worked.

Speed is a balancing act between ROI factors.

You need to know the whole story so you can make an educated decision about what’s dragging down your load time, and what’s converting for you.

You may need to keep a heavy hitter that is converting well and squeeze out everything you can from losers that have zero ROI. You just have them because some non-tech guru, with no data to back up their claim, said it was a good idea.

Get in the know and stop throwing darts in the dark.

That’s all the news from around here. Let’s jump into this week’s tips.

SEO Tips

Google confirms speed as mobile ranking factor

I told you so!

Google has officially confirmed that speed will be a prime ranking factor in their new mobile-first indexing initiative.

And, they’ve given us a date of July 2018 for when that ranking factor will go into effect.

And now you know why speed tests are my top priority and should be for you too.

Pinterest peeps, if most of your traffic is from mobile, you need to get serious about Google’s edict too.

As more sites get faster because of this, yours will become the least favorite one to visit.

And you know Pinterest is already taking aim at slow sites too.

Facebook has already devalued the Reach of posts from slow sites.

You’re going to stop getting traffic from anywhere if you don’t start taking all of this seriously.

What is UX and Why Bother?

Are users having a good experience on your site?

See the UX (User Experience) clues Google is picking up that affect your SEO.

Chief among them is speed.

High bounce rate and lack of return visitors is another big clue. If folks are abandoning your site in a hurry, especially because it’s slow, that’s going to impact your SEO too.

You may get 10k hits a day on your site, but how many of them are bouncing away before seeing anything? Meaning, is your time on site super low?

What percent are new visitors?

These are the things Google is checking.

And no, they can’t see your Google Analytics and Search Console data. That’s illegal. They are gathering their info via Chrome users and their usual crawl methods.

Google has a LOT of different bots checking different elements of your site.

See this excellent post from Yoast for more details.

It’s time to get serious about your UX. Trust me, you’ll make more money.

Voice Search Comes from Answer Box Snippets

A new study confirms that a whopping 80% of top Voice Search Results match top Answer Box Snippets.

This is why you need to be brainstorming how you can get in on these search perks.

And that’s exactly why we’re covering it in our DIY SEO course.

Those results tell what site provided the best answer to the query.

It could mean a ton of new traffic to your site.

WordPress Tips

WordPress 4.9.2 Released

A new vulnerability was found in the MediaElement code that WordPress incorporated into the core. So a patch was released last week. It is backwards compatible to all versions from 3.9 and above.

This would have been an auto update for you, so is likely already taken care of for you.

Virtual Reality in WordPress

One of the reasons I jumped on the Gutenberg bandwagon during WordCamp US in December was the reality that VR is coming to the web, and faster than we think.

WordPress MUST position itself for this radical shift in the way we will use the web, and Gutenberg is the first step in that direction.

This post on the WPMU Dev blog has a look at how VR is already here, and what’s coming for it in 2018, plus the types of sites that can make use of it right now.

I believe we’ll be well into 2019 before this becomes a “thing” for most big brand sites.

But, I think us regular bloggers will be getting in on the act before 2019 is over.

In fact, I think we will have Web 3.0 with full VR before 2021 and wearable technology to surf it with. I don’t think we’ll stay limited to our small phone screens forever. In fact, I don’t think phones will be the primary devices we rely on for so much forever either. They will be our backup device, sort of like our desktops and laptops are now, for when we need more power or other features we can’t do on mobile.

Blogger Tips

The Importance of Goal Setting for Bloggers

Remember when you first started your blog?

You had at least one or two goals in mind.

Remember how excited you were about putting butt in seat and making all that happen?

Goal setting is a good thing.

We need a little carrot to help motivate us to do all this work, don’t we?

If you’re looking for a little inspiration and motivation to get you revved back up about your blog, go read this post from Tasha at Designer Trapped in a Lawyer’s Body.

She’s got a workbook and all kinds of ideas that will get your gears in motion toward a goal again.

Wrap Up

That’s a wrap for this week’s Tips Tuesday.

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Be sure to visit BlogAid.net for more tips and resources and I’ll see you online.